Murder is Everywhere

Socrates

2012-01-30T00:01:00.001-05:00

No, this isn’t about the philosopher. I leave that kind of stuff to our Greek expert, Jeff Siger.

My post of today is about this guy:

Socrates Brasileiro Sampaio de Souza Vieira de Oliveira.

It’s been my privilege to be introduced to some of the greatest stars Brazilian football ever produced, Pele, Rivelino, Jairzinho, Gerson, Tostão, Falcão, Zico, but there was no one quite like Socrates.

We met first on the Lido, in Venice, back in 1983, when he was already a star, and I was still very ignorant about the beautiful game. He was there with a friend of mine. We boarded the same boat to go to the Rialto.

I’d heard of him, of course. In Brazil, Doctor Socrates was already a household name and widely-regarded as one of the greatest midfielders ever to play the game.

He’d been captain of the Brazilian team that played against Italy in the 1982 World Cup, a game of such surpassing skill and spontaneity that no one who saw it will ever forget it.

But I thought Doctor was just a sobriquet.

Not so. That day, in chatting with him, I learned that Socrates actually was a doctor, an orthopedic surgeon. And that he was also a folk singer, an author and a very modest and agreeable man.

Who, surprisingly, didn’t put football first.

The things that concerned him were eliminating poverty and building roads and schools.

And it wasn’t just talk.

In later years, after he retired, he went on to become a political activist. He wrote for newspapers, not only about sport, but also about politics and economics.

Unfortunately, he also became an alcoholic.

The activism was of a kind that could have gotten him killed during the military dictatorship of the 1970’s.

And the alcoholism did kill him.

Take a moment, now, to enjoy the Brazilian Team’s goals in the 1982 World Cup, from the days when Socrates was in his prime:

(C’mon, watch the video. Please! It’s a part of my continuing campaign to generate interest in the sport among you non-football fans. Remember, there’s only a little over two years to go before the event kicks off here in Brazil.)

Socrates died last month at the age of 56, just one day before his old team, Corinthians, won the Brazilian championship for the fifth time.

He was a doctor. He knew what the endless cigarettes and caiprinhas he was so fond of had done to his health.

Nevertheless, on the night he died, he went to a restaurant with a group of friends and overloaded his liver with the same degree of serenity that his namesake displayed when he drank the hemlock.

He was a most extraordinary man.

And Brazil is missing him.

Leighton - Monday

Quality of Life?

2012-01-29T00:49:00.002-05:00

Among the many, many things that irritate me about The Huffington Post is the fact that it insists on finding new ways to tell us which countries offer the best "quality of life."

Why does this irritate me? First, because it's stupid. I know people who would be happy anywhere, and people who couldn't have a good time if someone handed them a lamp with a genie in it. And let's face it: for a statistically significant number of people, what's desirable is simply what they don't have. Even when you get beyond those for whom a "better quality of life" would mean something as simple as "enough to eat," there's still the ever-present discontent with what's at hand. Many Swedes, for example, would like to live somewhere with palm trees, and lots of Peruvians would probably like to try a few hours at sea level.

Second, the winner always seems to be Liechtenstein or some other off-brand country you need spellcheck for, some place with mountains. Mountains are good for falling past, good for collecting (ughhh) snow in the winter, good for passes that funnel icy winds down on perfectly nice people, good for yodeling and lederhosen and goats. But to live with? Please.

All these intangibles aside, it seems to me that one index of how much people in a given country actually enjoy their quality of life might be how often they end it by their own hand. It's hard to come by statistics about what percentage of people living somewhere wished they lived somewhere else. Hard to identify a threshold - does a mild longing qualify? A frequent flip through National Geographic? The occasional semi-erotic daydream?

Suicide, on the other hand, has a clear threshold. So I asked myself, which countries have the highest and the lowest suicide rates? Surely those with the highest incidence of citizens offing themselves have to acknowledge a certain malaise. This being the age of the Internet, here's what I learned.

The nation with the highest suicide rate in the world (in 2010) was South Korea. (Numbers are not available for North Korea.) This is generally attributed to the rapid rate of economic and social change in Korea and the personal and professional pressures South Koreans impose upon themselves. Alcohol use, which is pretty liberal, may also be a contributing factor.

Twelve of the twenty countries with the highest suicide rates -- Lithuania, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Hungary, Russia, Latvia, Slovenia Ukraine, Serbia/Montenegro, Croatia, and Moldova -- were previously members of the Worker's Paradise of the Soviet Union. So that's yet another reason to be thankful to Communism; it left behind an environment to which death is preferable. Can there still be anyone who feels that Soviet-style Communism was a good thing? As Orwell recognized way back in 1945, some pigs were much more equal than others.

Japan, where suicide is, so to speak, a way of life, is seventh. (By the way, seventh place translates into 23.8 suicides per 100,000 people.) Temperature seems to be a relevant factor; Guyana and Sri Lanka are the only tropical countries in the top 20, and, in fact, colder countries--sorry, Yrsa--generally seem to have more suicides. (A lot of them have mountains, too.) This phenomenon is especially striking in view of the fact that all five of the countries with point zero (.0) suicides in the most recent reporting year are in, or on, the Caribbean.

Surprises? Some countries I tend to think of as miserable -- Iran, for example -- are pretty low on the index. The United States, at number 41, has fewer suicides than Switzerland, France, Austria, Sweden, Canada (!), Portugal, and Norway, but more than Australia, Germany, Denmark, and the United Kingdom, to name a few.

Across the board, no matter where they are, men are much more likely to kill themselves than women -- often ten times more likely, more usually four to five times. (The sole country in which there were more female than male suicides is Sao Tome/Principe in western Central Africa, but the numbers are so low it may be a one-year anomaly.) Beyond Sao Tome/Principe, the exceptions are rare: the numbers are almost even in Tajikistan; three quarters as many women as men kill themselves in India; more than half as many women as men in Kuwait, Singapore, and the Philippines; and a little less than half as many women in Turkey and Hong Kong, and a few other places.

Among the countries in which the writers on this blog set our books, France, at #21, has the most suicides per capita, all those great pastries notwithstanding. (France probably has the most existentialists of anywhere on the planet, too, and there may be a connection.) Iceland is second, at #38, Land-of-Smiles Thailand is third at 62, the United Kingdom is fourth at number 61, followed by Brazil (70) and Greece (84, and Jeffrey clearly has the right idea).

No numbers are available for Botswana, but South Africa is #23.

I have no idea what any of this proves and would be thrilled to get some suggestions. It's one of those topics that seems interesting on the face of it, but when you get down to the final paragraph, there's no conclusion. Yet another reason for me to learn to outline.

Anyway, keep living. You never know when you might meet someone.

Tim -- Sunday

Something lighter next week, I promise.

The Gods Will Be Back

2012-01-28T00:05:00.002-05:00

I long for the day when the mention of Greece will once again first bring to mind ancient gods, epic tales, and a land and sea infused at every inch with the seminal essence of western civilization. Someday that will happen, for financial crises are transient and gods are immortal, though not eternal—after all, they do need nectar and ambrosia to sustain them.

Ahh, yes, the good old days of true Greek gods quick and strong, knowing all things, capable of miraculous achievements.

It’s been a long while since I’ve read up on the ancient gods, and I must admit to often getting them mixed up, but I’ve just learned that my confusion puts me in illustrious company.

Socrates (469-399 B.C.E.)

According to Alexander S. Murray’s Who’s Who in Mythology, even Socrates was confused by the varying number of seemingly same gods (one Aphrodite or two?) and multiple names for one god (Zeus in summer was called Zeus Meilichios, the friendly god, and in winter Zeus Maemaktes, the angry god).

Aphrodite (Bouguereau 1879)

Some think that’s attributable to disparate early Greek tribes who even after coalescing as a single race kept the original names for their separate gods despite obvious similarities to each other (Dione, Hera, Gaea, and Demeter).

Hera with Zeus

But call them what you wish, the essential purpose of the Greek gods was the same: their existence and interactions explained to mortals the natural order of things, e.g., the earth, the sun, the moon, the stars, the clouds, lightning, thunder, earthquakes, storms, waves, and on and on as needed.

What made Greek gods so significant was that the essentially human form of the Twelve Olympian Deities of Mount Olympus and of the lesser gods living in other environs gave to those who worshipped them the sense that their deities could understand and relate to a mortal’s needs and fears.

The mythological explanations offered by the carryings on of the gods largely centered upon the three supreme rulers of the world: Uranos, Kronos, and Zeus.

The first to rule was Uranos. He represented the heavens and, as the husband of Earth, brought forth life and everything on our planet.

Uranos with Earth

His son, Kronos, ruled next as god of the harvest, ripening and maturing the forms of life brought forth by his father.

Kronos and Rhea

And, lastly, ruled Zeus, bringing order and wisdom to the universe.

Zeus overthrows Kronos (Van Haarlem 1588)

I think it’s safe to say that Zeus hasn’t been around for a while. Or has he?

Whatever, all of this impresses me, as it should every writer, artist, and musician who freely borrows from the tales of the gods in their own creations, albeit sometimes consciously oblivious to the source of their inspiration. So much of what we think unique to modern culture is simply a new way of retelling of what ancient Greeks witnessed in their deities.

I wish I had time now to say more. But there will be later. One must always make time for the gods.

Jeff—Saturday

Left Ear, Right Ear and Too Austere

2012-01-27T09:49:00.000-05:00

I remember the death of Princess Diana. Who can't? A nation entirely took leave of its senses. It was like waking up to find you'd been inculcated into a cult you never knew existed, all that showy grief and those crocodile tears. It was also an excuse for the very canny to exploit. My favourite story is of a pub owner in the North East, who, in the days after Diana's death, put a sign up in the window. It read: 'Due to the tragic death of Princess Diana, and as a mark of respect, Happy Hour will be cancelled this week.'

I see something similar now in these austere times. After years of living it up, we are being told to cut our cloth according to our means. I never really had that much cloth, even in the good times, which is why I walked around financially stark naked, but it's sound advice I suppose. I also have a bit of a problem with all those people urging the banks and the Government to do more for the responsible folk who saved their money. The hard-working savers, and hard-working families. But what about the feckless spenders? Don't we have rights too? We propped up this economy for years, and now we've been dumped, shoddily, callously, like a Gingrich spouse.

What irks me is that some people I know are enjoying this austerity thing a bit too much. The ones who slipped away from the pub before it was their round, or somehow seemed to be in the gents. They bragged about the bargains they found and we all turned our noses up. Look, a Saville Row suit that someone died in for £50!! How we laughed at their parsimony as they wiped the bloodstains from the soiled jacket sleeves. Now everybody's buying second hand clothes, and telling everyone else about it while they're at it, or that they're brewing their own beer at home, or cooking pots of soup and stew at the start of the week and making it last until Thursday. Let's just be clear: any home brew tastes absolutely disgusting, soup is not a meal, it's medicine, and leftover food is awful, unless its curry and only, and I mean ONLY, when eaten for breakfast with a hangover.

Everyone is talking about their budget. Even my sister, a lawyer, (and therefore hardly on the verge of the workhouse - just mentioning her, even without naming her, cost me £200) and a shopaholic who has so many shoes she makes Imelda Marcos look like Gandhi, told me at Christmas that 2012 would see her live within her means. No more than £150 on a single purchase. She'll probably just go and buy the left one the next day.

But there is a serious issue here. Namely, the businesses who will hide behind austerity to cut jobs rather than make a bit less money; and more insidiously, the Governments, like our very own coalition, who will hide behind austerity to slash any number of budgets and benefits that ordinary people rely on to live and survive, in the name of austerity when really the motive is ideological. Only this week the reprehensible lot who run the UK were caught trousers down trying to sneak through welfare cuts, or increase charges, that will only affect the poorest. Single mothers trying to track down errant fathers to pay towards the cost of bringing up their children will be charged for doing so by the Child Support Agency, while the social fund, basically a one-off payment to the truly desperate, usually to tide them over until some administrative hiccup is solved, or until a much needed cheque is paid to them, is to be abolished. Meanwhile, guess what? Huge bonuses are still paid in the city, the rich still manage to avoid paying their fair share of tax (this might have some resonance in the States, eh my old mate Mitt?) and the diabolical Mayor of London, who has spent four years coasting on public cash, still manages to go on two skiing holidays in one month.

So, Happy Hour is officially over. Unless you're rich.

cheers

Dan - Friday

Something from nothing

2012-01-26T08:26:00.000-05:00

As is the case in many Third World countries, most South African families don’t have enough money to give toys to their kids. As would be expected, the kids make their own – usually from stuff that nobody wants.

Ever since I can remember, I have watched kids (usually Black) playing with toys that were far removed from the Lego, Meccano, Lionel trains, and so on that I was privileged to have. When young, my reaction was confused because I didn’t quite grasp the implications of poverty. The older I became, the more I appreciated the creativity of these home-made toys. Today I covet them.

What has happened is that this creativity has spilled over into the general community, which has needed to find ways to make money in times of horrific unemployment. So we are blessed in South Africa by a plethora of arts and crafts made from trash or stuff that no one else wants. My house is filled with them.

Pop cans are a huge resource for the do-it-yourself artist or toy maker. My online research indicates that Americans throw away, not recycle, 1500 cans a second - that's billions a year. Although not as wasteful, South Africans also gets rid of millions. Here is what you can do with them.

Roses – I have this bunch sitting on my desk in my office. Also saves water in this drought-prone land.

Sculpture – I saw this Coca Cola lion in a local shop.

Pictures – incorporating used cans and other leftovers into wall hangings is very popular here. How many brands can you find incorporated?

Tired of boring frames for pictures or mirrors? There is an alternative.

These handbags or purses use old car number plates as decoration.

And these notebooks have Castle lager cans as covers.

Do you need a shopping basket? Here's one made from cardboard, packets, advertising, etc.

Or need to know the time?

One of my favorite styles are baskets made from telephone wires. I wonder why my phone doesn’t work all the time.

A year or so ago, I was wandering around the Winterberg mountains, and I came across a little coop started by a farmer. She sold crafts made by locals, funneling all the money back to the artist. I couldn’t resist this hippo (a kubu) made from mud by a nine year old boy. It was his first sale as an artist.

One of my coffee tables sports half a dozen or so bird sculptures made from seed pods, mud, and wire. I love them.

Very common throughout the country is ‘stuff’ made from wire. It is fascinating to watch an artist sitting on the side of the road start with a long piece of wire, which is slowly bent into something gorgeous, like the baobab tree shown below, which I photographed on my village Knysna's Main Street.

Here is the one I own. I use it to hold the dried proteas picked from my garden.

It didn’t take long for these artists to incorporate beads into their work, and bead pieces are now a separate genre. Look at the detail of this cock.

Anything can be used as subject matter from lizards, to giraffes, to seahorses (the symbol of my village, Knysna).

And all of this is separate from the wonderful wood and soapstone sculptures that are for sale everywhere.

I'm so lucky to live in a place where creativity thrives, producing objects rich in colour and design.

Stan - Thursday

The end of the rainbow - Norway

2012-01-25T18:05:00.005-05:00

I am just back from a trip to Norway. There I visited three cities, Oslo, Stavanger and Bergen, on a mini tour organized by my Norwegian publisher Kagge. The trip included 2 other authors, Swedish Ulrika Davidson who specializes in low carb cooking and Jørn Lier Horst a Norwegian crime fiction writer that just won the bookseller prize in his home country and has now written a crime novel for teenagers. Both were super fun and the trip was very successful in every way. I bought Ulrika’s low carb book which promises a loss of 6 kilos in 6 weeks and am going to put my husband through the wringer. He will need more than one round though, how many I am not telling. I also bought Jørn’s children’s book and am going to read it to learn Norwegian. Although Norwegian and Icelandic are very similar langauages, like my husband I will need more than one round to reach my goal.

Norway is a paradise country. It is beautiful to behold and wealthy in a good way. It is the world’s second richest nation and this is not per capita. It is a net external creditor of debt, meaning they don’t owe – they are owed. I actually did not know that was possible. But Norway’s prosperity stems from them having one of the richest reserves of oil and gas outside the Middle East, endless hydropower, very good fishing grounds and lots of metals. But Norway does not behave like a Kardashian, despite their wealth being pretty a pretty recent development. Not at all. As an example, the profits from the gargantuan oil industry goes into a fund belonging to the nation. No one from their royal family is buying cars made of pure platinum or cleaning out their ears with Q-tips made of cashmere. The money is for the people. And did I mention that the people are great? It sounds too good to be true but it is not.

Well actually there is one snag. Everything in Norway is super expensive. I snuck to a MacDonald’s to have a hamburger without Ulrika seeing me and found out that a quarter pounder costs about almost the same as a bottle of Champagne in other countries. A sweater I liked cost the same there as if it were made of fur here, and so on. So I did not go on a shopping spree, only bought the diet book and the kid’s book. As an author I find it perfectly OK for books to be expensive. Hamburgers no and sweaters no.

There was one last thing that endeared Norway to me, hammered in the admiration actually. I passed through three Norwegian airports: Gardemon in Oslo and the somewhat smaller ones in Bergen and Stavanger. In each one the biggest ads hanging from the ceiling or posted on the walls were not from credit card companies, banks or vodka producers. No, they were ads promoting engineering as an occupation, from firms desperate to show why engineers should take up a job with them, or from recruiting agencies urging engineers to put their careers in their hands. Not that it would take much to operate a successful recruiting agency specializing in engineers in Norway if the shortage is anything to go by. Get one hopeful with a so-so CV in the morning, he’s got a job by lunch. On a slow day.

And this is the country my ancestors left to go to Iceland 1200 years ago. Because they found the king of the time annoying. And they did not even know Iceland existed. They just sailed away. To the north, in the direction of cold. So it is no wonder that the women of Norway did not want to join them.

It has been snowing here for days. Before entering the house in the evening you have to memorize where exactly you left the car in the driveway, as in the morning it will have disappeared. Become one with the plump, thick white carpet that swallows everything immobile. If my ridiculous ancestors had only tried counting to ten when dealing with the irritating monarch, I could be sitting in Bergen cleaning my ears with a cashmere Q-tip while yawning over the job offers piling up. Ah, to be an engineer in Norway.

Wednesday - Yrsa

below Paris

2012-01-23T21:51:00.000-05:00

A few more photos from the file of subterranean Paris -beyond these gates of Parc Monceau, where Marcel Proust walked

lies a whole graveyard of Metro trains under this entrance

during the war a big shelter for the Metro VIP's with air sealed doors was constructed

Cara - Tuesday

Literatura De Cordel

2012-01-23T00:01:00.001-05:00

If you come to visit us in Brazil, you’ll occasionally see a stand where the offerings look like this:

Literatura de Cordel (lit. “cord literature”) derives its name from the way the wares are often displayed, i.e. hung by a cord, usually with the aid of clothespins.

Such stands are less common in the southern part of the country, but are a feature in many of the fairs and markets of the northeast, principally in the States of Pernambuco, Paraiba and Ceará.

These little booklets are the last survivors of a form of popular literature with which an inhabitant of eighteenth-century Madrid, or nineteenth-century England, would have been quite familiar, but that you’d be hard-put to find elsewhere in the modern world. They contain stories and ballads and are generally produced in black-and-white, illustrated with woodcuts.

Down through the years, the content has taken-on a distinctly Brazilian flavor.

Many of the books deal with the folklore, legends and history of the northeast, subjects like Lampião and his band.

I've previously posted about him under the title The Bandit King. And, if you like, you can read that post by clicking on this link:

http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/2010/01/bandit-king.html

One of the classics of cord literature, The Arrival of Lampião in Hell, by José Pacheco, is much-prized by collectors.

And a satire on the Brazil’s most recent president, The Arrival of Lula in Hell has been enjoying a good deal of success in recent months.

As to the art, two of the more talented woodcutters are Adir Botelho and José Francisco Borges.

This is Botelho:

And this is a work from Borges, who has had expositions at both the Louvre and the Smithsonian:

Leighton - Monday

In the Beginning

2012-01-22T00:43:00.001-05:00

One of the nicest things about having a website is that people write me letters. My personal website, although it's got the usual self-serving promotional nonsense on it, is largely taken up by a section called FINISH YOUR NOVEL, in which I try to tell people some of the things I've learned through years of failing and trying again.

So a lot of my mail comes from aspiring writers. A few days back I got a long letter from a 16-year-old high school girl, who pretty much made my jaw drop. Among other things, she said:

" . . . I recently started developing my latest idea for a novel. With my previous ideas, I had never fully explored the idea and ended up letting it sit until I found myself saying "When am I going to start that novel again?" Of course, when that would occur I ended up spitting out a few more random bursts of ideas and that was that. The cycle repeated itself.

"So now I'm to the point where I feel idle in my life - I'm going nowhere and have no general direction I want to go in. It's quite annoying, actually. A high school junior striving for success to take her into unknown territory - her future. But despite the stresses of getting into a good college and everything that may entail, I find myself coming back to the yearning to write a book. Often I ask myself, "So when are you going to actually sit down and write?"

She says that in her other artistic endeavors, "What takes me the longest is starting the piece. Staring at a blank canvas is a lot like staring at a blank sheet of paper, in my opinion. I'm at peace while working, but starting is insanely difficult, especially when I don't have direction."

So, okay, she's extraordinary, and I should probably be asking her for advice rather than giving it to her. But she asked. And here's part of what I wrote back:

The first thing I'd suggest is that you decide what kind of book you like best, and choose that form. If you've read a lot of thrillers or YA or steampunk or dystopian books or historical novels or whatever, you have an intrinsic sense of how they work, how they're structured. That's a big head start.

I'm going to give you two pieces of similar advice from somewhat disparate sources and then one more piece of advice that says the same thing, but from the perspective of a novelist -- actually, my favorite living novelist.

First, from the German writer Goethe: "Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it; Beginnings have genius, power, and magic in them."

Second, from Jacques Copeau, one of the leading figures of 20th-century classical theater (this quotation actually inspired Laurence Olivier to stop worrying about getting more training and just start acting): "There is only one way to begin to do a thing, and that is to do it."

You can see where these are leading. Third is an excerpt I read two weeks ago in my favorite novel of the year, Haruki Murakami's "1Q84."

The character is a young writer who's been given an opportunity to ghost-edit a manuscript by a 17-year-old girl that has a peculiar power but is abysmally written. And he needs desperately to get started.

"He had no well-defined plan for the rewrite, no consistent methods or guidelines he had prepared, just a few detailed ideas for certain sections. . . . But events had already started moving, and he had a limited amount of time. He couldn't just sit there, thinking, arms folded. All he could do was deal with one small, concrete problem after another. Perhaps, as he worked on each detail by hand, an overall image would take shape spontaneously."

This is as good a description of the writing process as I've ever read. Writing is like laying stepping-stones over a void: each scene, each idea, makes the pathway a little longer, and eventually something begins to sort of shimmer at you in the distance, and that'll be the real nature of your novel. We learn what we're writing about by writing about it, and then we go back and either tidy up the beginning or rewrite it entirely. But whether that beginning is ever seen by a reader or not, it was an absolutely essential part of writing the book.

So what I'd suggest is setting a totally arbitrary schedule. Give yourself a month or so to figure out what kind of book you want to write, and then think of a character, or two, or three, and a situation that might lend itself to that kind of book. In a wonderful recent documentary on Woody Allen, the interviewer asked where Allen's ideas came from, and Allen said he has ideas all the time and he writes them on any old piece of paper and puts them in a suitcase so he can rifle through them whenever he needs a subject. Then he pulled out a few and read them aloud. One of them was, "A man inherits the equipment of a great magician."

That was it. No and then he, no and his friends say, not even, but. Just that sentence. Remember, in the section of my site that you read, my most basic definition of a novel: "A novel is the story of someone who . . ."

So get your sentence and create a folder on your hard drive and start to write. You can throw ideas into if for a while if you like, but pretty quickly, if I were you, I'd dive in with an opening sentence that engages your imagination: "She always remembered which night it happened because of the lunar eclipse . . ." and keep going.

And keep going and keep going.

When you get into trouble, remember that we all get into trouble, every single time we do this. And remember also that your book isn't going to be perfect, so don't stop for imperfections. Make them stronger later. The French poet Paul Valery said, "A poem is never finished, only abandoned." This is equally true of novels. Get through the story the best you can.

Then you can write your second novel.

Tim -- Sunday

Guest Author: Anne Zouroudi

2012-01-21T00:05:00.002-05:00

It is my distinct honor to present as our guest blogger my colleague in Greek arms, the distinguished novelist Anne Zouroudi. Anne brings a gifted lyrical voice to the mystery genre, and to say that her detective, Hermes Diaktoros aka The Fat Man, is a magical protagonist tells only part of the tale.

Anne was born in the north of England, and after a business career that included a stint on Wall Street, she moved to the Greek islands, where she married and lived for some years. Anne now lives in the Derbyshire Peak District but her attachment to Greece remains strong, and the country is the inspiration for much of her writing. She is the author of the Mysteries of the Greek Detective, each based on one of the Seven Deadly Sins: “The Messenger of Athens” (shortlisted for the ITV3 Crime Thriller Award 2008 for Breakthrough Authors and longlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize), “The Taint of Midas,” “The Doctor of Thessaly” and “The Lady of Sorrows,” shortlisted for the East Midlands Book Awards in 2010. Her most recent published novel is the sixth in the series, “The Whispers of Nemesis.” Book seven, “The Bull of Mithros,” will be published by Bloomsbury in June 2012. Anne’s website and blog are at www.annezouroudi.com

Welcome, my friend.

It’s not everyone who’d relish an enforced stint in the Greek army. Certainly I wouldn’t—the very idea of bunk beds and reveille, parade grounds and bossy, unsmiling men barking orders (orders? I don’t take orders) makes me shudder, and the indignities of communal showers and latrines would have me AWOL within hours.

But my son, it seems, is quite looking forward to it. Which is just as well, since at the end of this month, he’ll have his head shaved, be kitted out with khakis and heavy boots, and enter the Basic Training programme for National Service recruits at the barracks in Nafplio, a couple of hours drive from Athens on the Argolic Gulf.

He’s proud to be joining a fighting force with over 4000 years of history—a once-legendary army commanded by Alexander the Great and Achilles. Sadly, at this low-point in Greece’s fortunes, the army is feeling its share of the pain. With the military budget slashed, basic training has been cut from two months to two weeks; there are rumours there’s no ammunition for recruits’ firearms training, and few weapons for them to fire if the ammo were there.

A few months ago, I was invited to Athens by my Greek publisher. It was a memorable trip, not least of all because I was interviewed live, in Greek, on national television (Yes, it was terrifying. My Greek’s not bad, but it’s not up to that standard, not even close. But the gods were feeling kind, and somehow I got away with it). A book-signing was scheduled in one of the city’s huge bookstores, a splendid five-storey palace of reading overlooking Syntagma Square. The event went well, questions were asked and answered. We said our goodbyes, and my publisher led me out onto the square.

Revolution was brewing there. Tens of thousands of people were gathering to protest the latest Draconian measures the government was proposing (Draco was himself an Athenian, in around 600BC; his punishment for debtors was slavery). Athenian Greeks are highly political, and will readily strike, demonstrate or protest to make their point. But this was different. The atmosphere was calm, but touched with danger; these were people right at the end of their ropes, and had little to lose.

The Athenians I met on that occasion were close to despair. Knowing they were Europe’s whipping boys, each felt the disgrace personally; humiliated by the screw-ups of their leaders, they felt shame in their failure to thrive in what had seemed the Brave New World of the Euro. Like an army defeated, they were on their knees, and it was tragic to see them brought so low.

But Greece has been down before, and she’ll pick herself up. She’ll pick herself up, because at the heart of every Greek is a Zorba-like outlook on life which makes them flourish.

I recall a journey by taxi, on the island of Kefalonia—a beautiful island with glorious beaches. The taxi-driver was a genial soul called Manos; he offered his congratulations that we had mastered some of his language, and took our understanding as his cue to talk at length about his life.

“Look,” he said. “If the taxi business goes well, or if it goes badly, what do I care? I have a piece of land with a few olive trees, and every year I make my oil. I have my garden and my vegetables, I have a few chickens and I grow a few grapes to make a glass of wine. I have my beautiful wife, and my beautiful children, and we’re all healthy. What more does a man need?”

A wise man, indeed, and fairly typical, in my experience, of an attitude bred in that land of milk and honey. Greeks out in the islands will, I feel, weather Greece’s current economic storm much better than city dwellers, because they have the resources for subsistence close at hand. In the islands, you can still gather snails after the rain, and make a stew; you can pick wild greens, catch a fish, keep a few chickens or rabbits in the backyard, and many people do so. In many ways, the remoter islands especially have changed very little since Homer was a boy, and since the gods were bestowing gifts and wreaking havoc.

But what of those gods now, in Greece’s hour of need? Have they deserted the mountains and meadows, abandoned the rivers and the seas?

Let me end with a quote from the Messenger of Athens, where old Nikos is trying to persuade his niece out of an affair.

“There are no gods,” said Irini.

“Why so certain? Look.” Nikos gestured towards the hillsides, and at the open sea. “This is their terrain. They’re not far away. Some say when the people stopped believing in them, they ceased to exist. But this view’s still what it was when Jason built the Argo and the Minotaur was eating virgins in the labyrinth. Two thousand years, and nothing’s changed; and don’t think they’ve gone! Orthodoxy is just a facade, a veneer. If you look around, really look” – he pointed to the centre of his forehead – “using this eye, then you start to see. They’re here, and they’re watching.”

And taking a great interest in Greece’s fortunes, have no doubt...

Efharisto para poli, Anne.

Jeff—Saturday

Born or Taught?

2012-01-20T07:24:00.001-05:00

What do you think of creative writing? Or at least the teaching of it? Can people be taught the craft of creating convincing character, constructing plot, writing vividly and passionately? Many think so. After all, despite the troubles the publishing industry faces, creative writing courses, in the UK at least, are oversubscribed. Or perhaps it's because of those troubles; after all, it has never been easier to make a book available to the public. Yesterday I downloaded the new IBooks Author app. It came with a free damaged liver. I was crestfallen to learn you still had to supply the text. What are Apple playing at?

There has been a bit of a brouhaha about creative writing courses over here in the UK recently. A very important and prestigious writer and critic - or at least that's what he sees when he looks in the mirror - called Philip Hensher attacked the plethora of courses and said that academic institutions "will always prefer the second-rate and self-limited writer to the dangerous maverick." You don't need to be Freud to realise that Hensher sees himself as having a foot, clad in a brightly coloured sock to prove how really crazy he is, firmly placed in the maverick camp.

Giles Foden, another very important and prestigious etc, who is professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where the first UK graduate creative writing course was founded 40 years ago, hit back in suitably bitchy style. Hensher, he claimed, wanted his job and lost out to him after interview and is therefore bitter. UEA has just produced a collection of work written by its alumni, edited by Foden, and features stories from the likes of Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. The point of it being, 'Look how many great authors we've produced.'

But that's the UEA course, and even then only around 20 of the 300 or so who have taken the course could be counted as household names, according to Hensher. Many more have been published. But that still leaves the majority who never have been. There are hundreds of other creative writing courses now. Most of those who attend will never be published. Does that mean they have failed? Are they eaten up by anguish and regret? Or are they thankful for the experience? Do these courses still offer the talented writer a route to the book shops (or the route to the Amazon online store)?

I'm not sure. I know several writers who teach on some of these courses. Most enjoy it. It gets them out from behind their desk and into a room full of people, whose enthusiasm for and appreciation of literature energises them. There is great satisfaction, I've been told, in helping a student formalise their thoughts, structure their story and produce a convincing piece of fiction. Many of them tell me that they encounter some fabulous writers, who start the course hesitant and self-conscious, but then grow more confident and assured as it progresses. It is for that reason, they say, the courses are worthwhile.

But that also means, and these friends confirm it, there are those who are probably wasting their time. But rarely are they told this. Their presence means funds. In this climate, it's a rare and bold academic institution that will turn down cash.

For what it's worth, I think there's some merit in these courses. But only for those with a bit of life experience. I'm talking about those who have always wanted to write but have worked in other jobs, or raised kids, but are teeming with ideas and just need some guidance to turn those ideas into a sellable work of literature. I'm less convinced in the merit of taking teenagers straight from school and breeding them for a life in literature. They would be much better off getting a 'proper' job, living a bit, better still living alot, writing for their own pleasure, and then producing some work when they or it is ready, and attending a course if they need to. (But still keep the proper job. It's a bloody snakepit out there.)

And if I needed any proof to back up these thoughts, then I would need to look no further than two of my fellow blogmates, Stan and Michael, whose Edgar nomination for Death of a Mantis - richly deserved - proves the adage that age and experience beats youth and a terrible haircut any day of the week, and that a wine gets better as it matures (and that when it does, Stan and Mike are likely to drink it...)

Well done chaps!

cheers

Dan - Friday

Leonardo Pisano Bigollo

2012-01-19T11:03:00.001-05:00

It's very unlikely that you’ve heard of Leonardo Pisano Bigollo; I hadn’t until I started looked for some background information for this blog. He was born in 1170 and died some 80 years later, he was an intellectual friend of Emperor Fredrick II, and he is regarded as perhaps the greatest western mathematician of the middle ages. He also made an enormous contribution to western culture by recognizing and popularizing a concept that changed the way we deal with numbers to an extent equivalent to what computers have meant in our era.

But he is remembered today because he gave his name (or at least one of his names) to one of the most intriguing mathematical phenomena in nature. Part of the name problem is that he seemed to go under a variety of names – frowned upon nowadays! – but in the intellectual world he was often referred to as Leonardo Fibonacci or, most usually, just Fibonacci.

Statue of Fibonacci in Pisa

Fibonacci’s great contribution was that he recognized the value of the Hindu-Arabic number system, and popularized it in the west through a book Liber Abaci. At that time the Roman number system was in use. We still find it quaint to use it on clocks or at the end of movies to code the year, but imagine doing arithmetic in it. XII + XII = ? Easy rules enable us to work out 12 + 12 but how would you go about doing the Roman calculation? (No cheating by converting any of the Roman characters to Hindu-Arabic numerals.) And after you’ve worked that out you might like to try XII x XII = ? The only odd thing is that it took more than six hundred years from the invention of the Hindu-Arabic system for someone to get the point in the west. Of course, communication was very different in the twelfth century, and no doubt there was a bit of prejudice about foreign ideas. (Not everything’s changed in the last 800 years.)

Fibonacci did some really deep research of his own in number theory in an era where there were few established mathematical tools. But he's remembered today for a particular sequence of numbers which is now called the Fibonacci sequence, although it too goes back to the Hindu mathematicians. Fibonacci was interested in the numbers because of an idealized rabbit breeding problem. (I’m not going to go into that here – idealized rabbit breeding sounds like an oxymoron to me.) This is how the sequence works.

Fibonacci Chimney by Mario Merz

Each number in the sequence is obtained by adding the previous two numbers together. The first two numbers are 1 and 1. Thus the third number is 1+1=2. The fourth number is 1+2 = 3. The fifth is 2+3 = 5, the next 3+5 = 8, then 13, 21, 34 and so on. The first few terms of the sequence are displayed on the chimney of Turku Energia in Turku, Finland, in two meter high neon lights.

Fibonacci's Dream by MartinaSchettina

What is fascinating about the Fibonacci numbers is that they occur in all sorts of surprising places in nature. They lead to particularly attractive spiral curves, they predict the way leaves and flower petals are arranged. And those spirals are clearly visible in the seed heads of sunflowers and many others. The arrangement of plant primordia in this way even has a name - phyllotaxis.

A Fibonacci Spiral
Each square's side
is a Fibonacci number

They seem to have an almost mystical fascination. That's how they arose originally in connection with Sanskrit prosody. There is a formula which allows one to calculate the numbers, and it involves the Golden Ratio beloved of the ancient Greeks for the design of temples. For some reason there is a feeling of perfect proportion about this ratio. When we see it in art or architecture we immediately feel a satisfaction with the proportions. Where does that come from? Take a look at the Parthenon below.

Modern artists use the numbers themselves, and they made a bit appearance in The Da Vinci Code. There is a journal published quarterly devoted specifically to their properties and applications. Half an hour with Google shows that they are used to argue everything from numerological conspiracies to the existence of God.

However, their ubiquitous occurrence in nature turns out to be a nod in Darwin’s direction. The arrangement of leaves in this particular spiral allows the best average exposure to sunlight. The Fibonacci spirals of the sunflower seed head can be shown to be the best way of packing seeds that are generated at the center and then move outwards. Here’s a link to a YouTube simulation which shows how the process might work. Sunflower

So Fibonacci will be remembered forever, albeit maybe for the wrong reason. Not bad for a mess of rabbits.

Michael – Thursday.

PS Stanley and I just learned that our book DEATH OF THE MANTIS has been shortlisted for the Edgar Award for best paperback original. We're absolutely thrilled and just want to thank all our friends and readers out there for all your enthusiasm, encouragement and support.

M&S

The Anta Of Miracema

2012-01-16T00:01:00.013-05:00

“We’ve got a problem,” she said.

“I thought that’s what producers are for,” I said, “to solve problems.”

“Which is exactly what this particular producer happens to be doing, so stop looking through that viewfinder and pay attention.”

I did.

When she was sure she had my full attention, she went on:

“The mayor owns an anta, and he–”

“He owns a what?”

“An anta. And he wants us to take it back to São Paulo in the plane.”

The mayor in question presided over an out-of-the-way place called Miracema do Norte in the State of Tocantins. So out of the way, in fact, that we’d hired an aircraft to get us there. One like this:

As you can see, Embraer Xingus aren’t very big. We barely had enough room on board for the equipment and the crew.

And an anta, my friends, is this creature:

Most of you gringos would call it a Brazilian tapir. If, indeed, you’d call it anything at all, that is. Because, let’s be honest, how many times do you need to? It’s not like you find them on every street corner.

But I digress.

We were making a film for the state’s power company, and shooting footage all over town. Try that in any small town in Brazil without staying on the good side of the mayor. Fact is, you can’t. So the prefeito had to be placated.

“Why São Paulo?” I asked.

“To give it to a zoo.”

“Back up and explain.”

“He found it in the forest when it was a baby. Before it lost its stripes, he said.”

“They have stripes?”

“The babies do. He loves it.”

“So why does he want to give it to a zoo?”

“Because people around here eat them. She’s forever getting loose, and he’s afraid–”

“I get the picture. Aren’t there any zoos in this part of the world?”

“Not one.”

“So how are you going to–”

“I don’t know yet. I’ll see when we get there.”

“We?”

“You’re coming with me.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

“Why do I have to go?”

“Because he’s the mayor, and you head up this crew, and if you don’t go, it will be a snub. Just be sure to keep your mouth shut and let me do the talking.”

I hated being bossed around by producers.

But this one was my wife, so I went.

I think, at this point, a few words about antas might be in order.

They’re the largest mammal in Brazil, but we don’t see them often. And there are a number of reasons for that. Firstly, they love water and, like hippos, spend a good deal of time under it, walking along streambeds and remaining submerged for considerable periods.

Another reason is that the people who live in the regions in which they abound are very fond of the way they taste. Still another is that they’re spread very thin. Each anta requires an area of forest larger than 500 football pitches to sustain it, so they tend to lead solitary existences, except when they get together to mate. Still another is because they’re naturally shy. And, finally, their reproductive cycle doesn't favor continued existence. Their lives are relatively short (25 to 30 years) while their period of gestation is exceptionally long, It doesn’t help, either, that they bear but a single offspring each time.

They’re smart, though. Very smart. The brains of antas have a gigantic concentration of neurons ranking them among the most intelligent of nature’s creatures, which is probably the only reason there are any left at all.

And also, no doubt, one of the reasons why the mayor liked having Carlota in his backyard.

That was her name: Carlota. He’d had her, at that point, for about five years, and she weighed 500 pounds (225 kilograms) if she weighed an ounce.

She stood there nuzzling me with one of those flexible snouts tapirs have while my wife explained that small aircraft have their load limits, and we were close to exceeding ours, and if Carlota had been a mere 50 kilos or so, we would have been happy to oblige, but there was no way that the pilot, etc., etc.

By the time we finished, the mayor was disappointed.

But he understood.

And, as a sign of his continued good will, he offered us coffee.

Meanwhile, Carlota and I bonded.

I would have taken her along, really I would, if there’d been room on that plane.

But it wouldn’t have been to put her in a zoo.

You have no idea how charming an anta can be.

And I was quite sure none of my neighbors knew how good they’re reputed to taste.

Leighton - Monday

Gardenias

2012-01-15T00:56:00.000-05:00

My mother was born into gentility, or at least the Los Angeles version of it.

She was fourth-generation (very rare here in the 1940s), social register, coming-out party, Hancock Park mansion -- the whole little-princess,many-maids,engraved-invitation, tennis-anyone world. No one talked much about the fact that the guy who made all the money, four generations back, did it as the city's biggest plumber. "Trade" was far behind and forgotten by the time my mother was a troublesome teenager, tiptoeing off to the movie studios to work as an extra and sneaking the first of what would eventually be hundreds of thousands of cigarettes.

My grandparents were worried about her, and they were right to be. At the age of 21 or 22, spoiled, imperious, and ridiculously beautiful, she married a penniless Irish adventurer from Chicago who had already, in his middle twenties, run away to sea, lived in China, fled the Communists to the Philippines, and had a vision -- on the deck of a ship in the middle of the China Sea -- that told him he should fly airplanes. So he came home to risk his neck as a test pilot and stole my mother from her parents on his way to the airfield.

(There's a picture of my mom and dad, boarding a plane for their furtive honeymoon, over on my other blog, www.timothyhallinan.com/blog.)

By the time I was nine or ten, my father was a successful aerospace executive and we were living in Washington, D.C. where my mother adorned Republican circles and was frequently photographed with people like Pat Nixon. (There's a picture of that on the other blog, too.) As a slumming aristocrat, which was how she always saw herself, she decreed that my brothers and I should learn proper social graces, and Miss Courtney entered our lives in a cloud of Parfum Guerlain.

Miss Courtney undoubtedly had A Story but I never got to hear it. Born to a manor house somewhere well south of the Mason-Dixon line, she had been shipwrecked on the rocks of financial necessity and had, as my mother once put it when she didn't know I was listening, come down in the world. Still,with a combination of exquisite manners and the iron hand of a Prussian general, she was perfectly qualified to run a Cotillion.

So: the Cotillion. I believe it ate up most of Saturday afternoon and evening. Twenty or thirty kids, simmering with resentment at being all dressed up and in the company of the opposite sex on a weekend day, ate a dainty meal with fearsome gentility -- much dabbing of lips with linen napkins -- and then, as if that weren't torment enough, adjourned to some big room with a wooden floor and a record player, where we boys paired up with girls to learn dances that no one had done for 20 years.

And therein lay the rub. When I was nine, I was short. Most of the girls were tall. All of the girls wore vaguely menacing corsages made of fresh gardenias, pinned above the left breast.

Gardenias are not a lightly scented flower. That blossom-bedecked spot above the left breast was just about level with my nose. The music would start, we would do a simultaneous bow/curtsy, and I would take the girl of the moment into my arms and spin away with her on a bright swirl of music. And into a queasy, heavy, reeking cloud of gardenia fumes.

The room in which we danced was tightly closed against drafts. The heating system was terrifying. Thirty sweating boys and girls supplied a level of humidity I wouldn't experience again until I went to Bangkok. And then there were the gardenias.

Generally speaking, I made it to the Fox Trot, the fourth dance of the session. At the opening bars of the Fox Trot, I wove my way drunkenly between the couples, found my way into the boys' room, and lost my elegant lunch. Then I'd rinse out my mouth and go back for the next partner, the next dance, and the next nose-full of gardenias. By the end of the Cotillion, I'd lost all of lunch and part of the dinner I hadn't even eaten yet. For years afterward, I could smell a single gardenia all the way across a football stadium.

That which does not kill us, however, makes us stronger. I survived. I even, after several decades, got over my loathing for gardenias.

I just wish someone would ask me to Fox-Trot.

Tim -- Sundays

What's it All About?

2012-01-14T00:05:00.008-05:00

New Years is bye-bye. The eight days of Chanukah, gone. The Twelve Days of Christmas, poof! All there is to look forward to in the US is Valentine’s Day, exactly one month away. Whoopee. Yes, in the US there’s MLK Day on Monday but it’s the kind of holiday that bounces from one Monday to the next depending on the year. Like Presidents’ Day (this year that one’s on February 20^th); the kind that doesn’t fit into your internal, since childhood celebratory calendar. They’re more like a grown-up’s day off from the office sort of holiday.

By the way, for those of you wondering what is MLK and which Presidents have their own day I’ll tell you, but if you have to ask I doubt you’re celebrating either. MLK stands for Martin Luther King, Jr. and Presidents’ Day replaces George Washington’s birthday, but it’s never celebrated on his actual birthday of February 22^nd, although some places still call it Washington’s Birthday and in others it also replaces the celebration of Abraham Lincoln’s birthday (on February 12). Confused? That’s only fitting; after all it ended up this way because Congress couldn’t agree on what to call it. Frankly, I think it’s largely called Presidents’ Day because other Presidents felt left out. Sort of like the US electorate does the day after the Presidential Elections.

Two celebrating Presidents (Washington & Jefferson College)

But this isn’t about the state of US politics. It’s about … well, frankly I’m not sure what it’s about.

I’m on a plane out of Houston after a weeklong visit with my grandkids. They each had colds, but being the well-mannered four- and two-year olds that they are they shared what they had with their parents. So far not with their grandfather but their big, wet, sneezy, goodbye kisses at the airport have yet to report in to my immune system.

So, here I am on a flight back to New York. Wish it were back to Greece. But not yet. Sigh.

Then again, most of my Mykonian buddies are away on off-island holidays this time of the year. Those who can afford it. If you haven’t heard, there is a financial crisis in Greece. But this isn’t about that either. It’s about…

Interesting people on this plane. A true mix of skin colors and ethnicities. They look to be from Africa, Asia, Europe, India, Latin America, South America, The Middle East, you name it, and at least one (the fella next to me) is definitely from some yet to be discovered distant galaxy. Yet, when they speak, it’s usually in perfect English (FYI Dan, Michael, and Stanley, that’s American English.).

It seems to be that way almost everywhere I fly in the US these days, and I don’t think that’s because of the routes I choose. More likely it’s because Americans all look as if they’re from somewhere else—and they are. Even the Indians. All 312,851,346 of US and counting.

Flag of Faces at Ellis Island Immigration Museum, New York

But this is not about immigration policy…

Or American football. Although from the way Houstonians are carrying on about their team you’d think they believe every single American is rooting for the Houston Texans to beat the New England Patriots in this weekend’s Super Bowl playoff game. Yes, Beth, I was tempted to tell them that the other team does have its loyal fans, but as practically everyone in Texas is allowed to carry a gun, I decided it wiser to wait and twitter them the news once I’m back in gun-free (ha-ha) NYC.

So, what is it all about?

It’s about this….

And this…

I love and miss ya’ll very much.

Jeff—Saturday

Grammar Bores

2012-01-13T06:37:00.001-05:00

Few bores irritate me quite like grammar and punctuation bores. Is there anything more pointless than pointing out someone's misuse of an apostrophe, or that they dared to cheekily split an infinitive? Yes there is. Getting worked up over it.

So, this week, when the book chain Waterstone's decided to drop the apostrophe and become Waterstones, we had the apostrocalypse. Lots of people, wailing and gnashing their teeth publicly, but in secret delighted because it'll give them a subject to bore others stupid with until the end of time. 'Of course, I can barely bring myself to shop in Waterstones since they dropped the apostrophe. No wonder people are leaving school unable to write their own names. Why have you picked up that cheese knife Dan?' There is even, I learned yesterday, an International Apostrophe Day, as well as an Apostrophe Protection Society, for Gods sake.

Why do people buy these books? The ones who do are invariably the pedants who take great joy in pointing out mistakes. They know the rules. So why do they need a book about the rules? Presumably to confirm how virtuous and clever they are, and how stupid and ill-educated everyone else is, and how we're all going to hell in a handcart, which we might be, but it's because of irresponsible politicians, bankers and hacks and not people misusing an apostrophe.

Actually, I have another theory. They're masochists. You see, many of them went to school a long time ago. They were force-fed the rules like those poor geese that end up as foie gras, lesson after unending lesson, year after boring year, given hellfire when they broke them, thus scarring the whole of their school lives. Now, they see the youth of today, wandering around texting, facebooking in their strange language, and they read about these 'trendy' teaching methods that send kids out into the world unable to read and write (copyright: every right-wing newspaper) and it makes them bloody furious. These kids should be made miserable in their lessons like I was, they think. It should be one long tedious grind. They should despise school, hate learning, yet come out with a full command of the rules of English grammar, and feel the metaphorical cold slap of the cane across the palm of their hand each time they break them. Then, for extra pain, they should take a cold shower and flagellate themselves.

I exaggerate. A bit. But this debate (which I realise I'm only adding to here) has been rumbling on for years in the UK, where we have generations of folk who seem to care more about how something is written than what is actually written. A woman named Lynne Truss wrote a very silly book called Eats, Shoots and Leaves which advocated a 'zero tolerance' to punctuation and sold by the bucketload, followed by a raft of apoplectic imitators, each trying to outdo the other, lamenting text speak, and the Internet, and all other modern maladies which are apparently rotting our brain.

The problem with all this reactionary drivel, other than my point above about it focusing on style over content, and a very torpid style at that, is its inflexibility. The English language, the way it is written and punctuated, has always been subject to fashion and trends. It's how it's continued to grow, deepen and become so rich. And let's face it, some of the rules are stupid and arbitrary and deserve to be broken. Take the apostrophe for example. Kids learn it is there to be used for either the possessive or to show an omitted letter. Simple. Except when it comes to 'its' and 'its', when the possessive doesn't have an apostrophe. Why? Because of some rule dreamed up by printers and grammarians of the 19th century for reasons no one really knows. No wonder our children get so confused. A sub-editor once told me there was no greater indication of illiteracy than misusing its and it's. To which I should have told him that nothing indicated a withered, closed mind like the sentence he'd just uttered, but I didn't, because that would have cost me my job.

It's all about clarity and avoiding ambiguity, the grammar and punctuation SS will say. Except it's not. It's about frustration and resisting change and development. Yes, people need to be able to make themselves understood, and presenting your thoughts clearly in writing is important. The main purpose of grammar and punctuation is allowing us to make sense. I believe in teaching people so they can control control the language they use, and work out which words, sentences and structures suit them and what they want to say best, rather than merely learning the rules and being fearful of breaking them. How does that help anyone express themselves? The odd mistake isn't a problem, nor does it indicate anything other than a mistake. English needs to be taught better, and a grasp of the rules is important. But the pedants and purists need to realise that language changes, and that's to be welcomed. Innit?

cheers

Dan - Friday

“Clouds of rain” or “promises of blessings”

2012-01-12T17:54:00.000-05:00

All writers have to finesse parts of their main characters’ backgrounds. They have to make the characters believable both with respect to who they are and how they behave.

We obviously had to do this with our protagonist, Assistant Superintendent David Bengu, widely known as Kubu. How were we going to have the only child of a Botswana sharecropper end up as one of the country’s finest detectives?

The solution was simple. Kubu did well in primary school in his hometown of Mochudi. Typically he would have progressed to the local high school, which would have been of a decent but not high standard. But fate intervened, and the local priest in the church his family attended saw Kubu’s potential and persuaded a private school in Gaborone to give him a scholarship. His parents certainly couldn’t have afforded to end him there.

Founder Deane Yates

We decided that the school that he would attend was Maru a Pula, which in Setswana means “clouds of rain” or “promises of blessings”. The reason we chose Maru a Pula over several other private schools was that my high school headmaster, Deane Yates went to Gaborone in 1972 to found it, with the encouragement of the president of the country Sir Seretse Khama.

It was an easy finesse. Poor kid gets a great education at a top school through a scholarship arranged by the local priest.

The story would have ended there but for my penchant for frequently moving between the United States and South Africa. One January, I think it was, about five years ago, I was standing in line waiting to board the KLM flight to Johannesburg. I was near the front of the queue and noticed a man a few places in front of me. His profile looked familiar. I racked my brains and eventually decided it looked like my high school math teacher, David “Doggy” Matthews, last seen in 1964 – thirty odd years before. I approached the man and asked him if he were indeed David Matthews. He said he was. I introduced myself, and he immediately remembered both me and my brothers and parents. I was astonished at his recall of a family amongst all the families he had known.

Obviously we chatted while we waited to board. Two things emerged. First, he lived only a few kilometers from my house in Knysna on the Indian Ocean coast of South Africa. And second, he had been the second headmaster of Maru a Pula. This was exciting because it suddenly gave me access to more information about the school and hence about Kubu himself.

Doggie asked me to join him and his wife for drinks one Sunday night at their smallholding near me. When I arrived, he introduced me to an Andy Taylor – an American. He was, and still is, the current headmaster of Maru a Pula.

Current Maru a Pula headmaster, Andy Taylor

This was amazing. Now I had a person with a contemporary view of schooling in Botswana and of the country itself. Andy, it turned out, also knows everybody who is somebody, and everybody else as well. Through him we have met everyone we needed to meet in our research for the Detective Kubu books. We have dined with the Commisssioner of Police and the Chief Forensic Pathologist (whose labs we also toured). We have talked with the remarkable Unity Dow, former High Court judge and wonderful novelist (you should read her Screaming of the Innocent) and spent time with the equally remarkable head of the human rights organization Ditshwanelo (“human rights not human wrongs”). The list goes on – all because we chose Maru a Pula as the school Kubu should attend. And because the fates conspired something positive while I was standing in an airline queue.

A word about the school. It is one of the premier schools in southern Africa with students from over 30 countries. It is dedicated both to academic excellence as well as to preparing students to be proactive members of their communities. You can see a short movie about the school at http://www.maruapula.org/about-map/map-movie or read about the school at http://www.maruapula.org.

One of the areas that Maru a Pula stands out is in the area of the Arts:

Maru a Pula Arts Centre

Home of Maitisong, the premier centre for the performing arts in Botswana, attracting thousands to our campus every year
Site of the highly acclaimed Maitisong Cultural Festival, the nation's largest arts festival
World-class programmes in the visual and performing arts- drama, music and fine art
Our marimba band has recorded three CDs and toured Canada, Brazil, Portugal and the USA (tours in 2003, 2008 and 2010).

Maru a Pula students

It is schools like this that are preparing kids to be community leaders in Africa. Should you ever visit Botswana, a visit to the school will be a highlight. Although I can't promise rain, I can promise blessings.

Stan - Thursday

PIP POP

2012-01-11T16:27:00.001-05:00

I often wonder if the populations of large countries behave as oddly those in micro-countries such as Iceland, and am inclined to think they do – you just don’t notice it as much because of all the people At the moment the Icelandic nation is fixated on breast implants by a French manufacturer called PIP. These supposedly leak 1-2 % of the time and are suspected of causing illness ranging from mild migraines to Ebola. According to the news about 400 women in Iceland have these implants although the importance put on the topic seems more in line with the number being 400 000. Which would mean that every man woman and child out of the 300 000 people here would carry a pair, and 100 000 of us two pairs – back and front.

What is mostly discussed is who is to pay for the removal of these flimsy, leaking implants as there is no compensation coming from the bankrupt company PIP. At the moment the government will pay for an inspection and the ensuing operation if the implant is found to leak but otherwise just the inspection. Some find this too much, others too little. Many of the women involved do not care if they leak now or not, they want them out and find the government a bit stingy wanting them to keep them in until further notice. But others disagree and say to hell with paying for this. The reasoning of these individuals is that the decision to have the implants in the first place was the woman’s own and thus it’s her problem now that they need to come out. Others are more understanding and note that we have a health crisis and it is the social responsibility of the health system to step in no matter how things came about. The exchange of opinions between the two opposing sides becomes quite heated and at times it feels as if the 2-4 operations that are believed to be required will topple the nation into the abyss of bankruptcy.

And what do I think? Pay up. No question. I don’t think it is any of my business why the women involved had this done, no more than I would meddle in a middle aged guy’s right to jog so much that he ends up requiring all sorts of knee operations - which the health system pays for without a shrug. Pay it all for god’s sake. Spare us getting all judgmental when it involves something you yourself are not participating in. Or go for the other option: pay nothing for anyone. Which is not really something we want.

My sister is a doctor and in a recent conversation she mentioned that it is long timely to discuss more openly how the mind strongly influences how we feel and perceive our own health. She was not referring to the PIP fiasco but to a study recently conducted on mildew in older buildings such as schools. The study which took place here in Iceland was done in such a way that pupils in certain schools were at first polled about how they felt. Almost all noted being healthy and feeling well. A week later the mildew check was made and in some schools it was found to be present. This was announced to the afflicted school’s officials and they sent the kids home with a notice regarding what had been established and the ill effects it could possibly have on kids’ health. Soon after the same children were polled again and now they were all miserable, experiencing painful headaches, stomachaches, difficulty breathing, joint pains and all sorts of other symptoms. The presence of the mildew had made them sick although it had done so sort of once removed as its biological presence had nothing to do with anything if their first replies were anything to go by.

The mind plays tricks on us all if given half the chance. A lot of the women with PIP implants now feel very ill after the whole debacle has been on the news for days on end and the main topic of conversation in every Icelandic cafeteria. These same women would likely feel perfectly fine if the news had sprung next month instead of last weekend. But be it the mind, be it the popping PIP – it does not matter. What is being ill other than feeling ill when it all boils down to nothing? Take the shoddily made PIP implants out of the equation or scenario and then these women would not feel ill today. So they are ill because of the implants. Maybe not biologically, but ill nonetheless. So take them out if they want them out. What is the big deal here?

Maybe the minds of the guys working for the European CE certification body played tricks on them when they repeatedly provided PIP implants their stamp of approval for use within a human body.

Wednesday – Yrsa

P.S. I feel as if my point did not get across very well in the post above. What I was gunning for was that you don’t have to understand everybody or respect their decisions to be able to appreciate human diversity. It makes life wonderful.

from kings to occupiers

2012-01-09T23:24:00.000-05:00

More facets of Paris from the photo file:

la galette du Rois - the Epiphany cake eaten last week chez nous and sold in boulangeries all during January. The ancient feast celebrating the three Kings who found a baby in Bethlehem still observed today. There's a feve, a porcelain charm, buried inside and whoever gets that slice is king or queen and wears the crown.

The eye in the courtyard of the Marais - this caught me in my tracks on the street one day. I looked inside and the eye stared back from the courtyard. An exhibition? Never found out.

Passage Verdeau, a 19th century glass covered passage in the 2nd arrondissement, one of many built to protect shoppers from the muddy unpaved streets, the weather and horse droppings. There were once over 100 passages couverts throughout the city, now only about 20 still exist. Some still protect passages with very high-end stores, others with just regular shops. Passage Brady in the 9th arrondissement is filled with Indian restos and Tamil voices.

FFI French Forces map of German Occupying Forces and emplacements furnished by Resistance members before the battle for Liberation from the Police Museum.
Cara - Tuesday

The Imperial City

2012-01-09T00:01:00.001-05:00

This is Pedro I, the first emperor of Brazil.

In 1822, while on a journey to the gold fields of Minas Gerais, he spent the night at a farmhouse, high in the mountains above Rio de Janeiro.

There, some 70 kilometers distant from the capital, and at an altitude of almost 800 meters (2,600 feet), he encountered a climate much more invigorating than the stifling heat he’d been experiencing down on the coast.

Later, when the opportunity arose, he bought property in the area, intending to build a summer palace.

But it was not to be. In 1831, before he could bring his plans to fruition, he was forced to abdicate in favor of his five-year-old son.

Fast forward twelve years.

The young emperor, Pedro II, resurrected his father’s project by creating a town around the property.

He called it Petropolis, Greek for “City of Pedro” – named after himself.

And then he commissioned a Brazilian army engineer, Julio Frederico Koeler, to design him a building.

The neoclassical result, decorated with imported marbles and noble Brazilian hardwoods, became the royal family’s favorite residence.

Where they lived until Pedro II was sent into exile at the age of 64.

Here’s a link to a previous post about him. If you’re unfamiliar with his character, you’re going to enjoy reading about this most remarkable man.

http://murderiseverywhere.blogspot.com/2010/05/greatest-brazilian.html

Upon the abolition of the monarchy in 1889, the newly-proclaimed republic took possession of the palace and of the Imperial Regalia. And, unlike what happened upon the abolition of other monarchies, no item of the Crown Jewels was ever sold or destroyed.

So, today, on a visit to the palace, one can see not only the Emperor’s throne…

…but also his crown.

The palace’s archives also remain.

They consist of more than 250,000 original documents, ranging from the 13^th to the early 20^th century.

The gardens were designed by the French landscape architect, Jean Baptiste Binot, under the emperor’s personal direction.

And, elsewhere in the town, you can see the mansions of the elite of the time -- the wealthy and titled who frequented the imperial court.

If you’re going to be in Rio for Carnival, or better yet for the World Cup, I recommend a bus tour up to Petropolis

It will take you about ten hours, roundtrip, and will cost you about US$ 70, which includes the entrance fee for the palace.

Leighton - Monday

Picture Perfect

2012-01-08T00:55:00.000-05:00

The most frequent question at bookstore events is, “Where do your ideas come from?”

Well, most of the time, they appear out of thin air. But once in a great while something from what I try to think of as “real life” prompts a story development. Here's an example.

Some time ago, my wife and I had the good fortune to make friends with someone whom I'm not going to name, but she had been famous for several decades due to a series of very funny books she'd written for a large audience of women who, like her, hated to cook and do housework.

We had mutual friends, but we met her face-to-face for the first time in Hawaii, when I was on my way to Asia to write and my wife was accompanying me as far as Bali. What we had feared would be a slightly awkward lunch turned into a prolonged, delightful, and highly lubricated lunner, comprising lunch, dinner, and many, many drinks in between.

We were in love with her when we left, and remained so for years and years.

She was in her early seventies when we met, and more vigorous than either my wife or I, who were in our late forties. Ten years later, we got a note from her saying she was going to marry. (Her first husband died before we met her.) Enclosed were three pictures of her and her husband-to-be.

They scared me silly.

She (let's call her Margaret) was sitting on quite a bit of money; she'd sold a very large number of books. And she was now in her eighties. The pictures she'd sent us were Polaroids, and she looked ecstatically happy in all three of them. I couldn't tell you how happy her fiance looked, because we couldn't see his face.

In any of the pictures.

In the first, he had his head down, and his features were obscured by the bill of his cap. In the second, he'd turned his head as the shutter snapped, and he was a blur. In the third, he was kissing Margaret on the cheek and her profile obscured most of his.

I immediately called to congratulate her and to grill her diplomatically about him. She'd known him forever, she said; he'd been a friend of her husband's and was, in her words, richer than God. I relaxed and offered an unnecessary blessing, and the two of them lived happily until Margaret passed away.

But in the nasty, nefarious part of me that makes bad things happen to good (if imaginary) people, those photographs had taken root. I thought about them almost every time I wrote a book, but the opportunity to use them never came up until my most recent ebook, LITTLE ELVISES.

The hero of LITTLE ELVISES is a Los Angeles burglar named Junior Bender, who moonlights as a private eye—for crooks. That's a good way to make dangerous enemies, so Junior lives in a succession of dreadful motels in an area—the San Fernando Valley—that's especially rich in dreadful motels.

His first day on his new case has been a bad one; he's just been shot at. Already unhappy at this turn of events, he becomes even more unhappy when he sees there's a light on in the room adjoining his, which gives him pause, because he's rented it, too. (An adjoining room can be used as an escape route.)

But the room's occupant turns out to be Marge, the surviving owner of Marge 'n Ed's North Pole, the motel of the week, and Marge has a problem: her daughter has disappeared after running off with a man of whom Marge instinctively disapproves because he wears a pinkie ring. Junior tries to fob her off with assurances until:

“Look at these.” Marge dug into a purse the size of a saddlebag and came out with two color snapshots. She dealt them at me, giving each of them an expert, Vegas-worthy flick that carried them from one bed to another. I picked them up and found myself looking at two shots of the same couple.

The female was clearly the issue of Marge's loins, if the pronounced nasal apparatus and the long upper lip were any indication, but the man was a complete mystery. In one shot, he was shading his eyes from the sun, and he'd tilted his hand down until nothing showed but his mouth, and in the other, he'd turned his head away at the last moment, creating an interesting modern abstract where his face should have been.

Not good.

Marge said, “Tell me about that.”

"Okay,” I said. “I'll think about it.”

And he does.

So it took 30 years, but I finally got to use Margaret's Polaroids. And they lead Junior toward a monster who preys on the lonely and the unhappy. And, at the end, a big surprise.

(I'm working around the clock on my publisher's edit to THE FEAR ARTIST, the new Poke Rafferty, so I "borrowed" this piece, which I originally wrote for novelist Jackie King's blog. Thanks, Jackie)

Tim -- Sunday

Mykonos in its Innocence

2012-01-07T00:05:00.005-05:00

I just saw a new batch of old photographs of Mykonos collected by Dimitris Koutsoukos, a friend who’s a master at collecting and preserving the photographic history of his native island. You can find more of Dimitri’s fascinating work at this YouTube link to dozens of his videos setting still photographs to music.

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=dimitris+koutsoukos&aq=0

What immediately struck me about his latest photographs was the period of time they covered: the mid-1950s through the early-1970s. Those decades bridged a transition in lifestyles that turned Mykonos from perhaps the poorest place in Greece into the wealthiest.

Here’s a view looking down upon the old town of Mykonos and another of the symbol of “the island of the winds” at a time when windmills actually served to turn grain into flour.

Mykonians have always taken great pride in honoring God and country.

As they have in their children.

But the times required hard work.

Shared in by all.

There still was time to play.

And tourists found themselves welcome.

No matter who they were.

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Bridget Bardot

Yul Brynner

But none predicted what was to come, even those locals who had a glimpse of the future.

But all that is a past to which we bid adieu.

As we dream of what the future may bring.

Jeff—Saturday

Blinking in the daylight

2012-01-06T06:42:00.001-05:00

For a forthcoming project, I'm currently immersing myself in pre and post-war London. Specifically the period around 1950, when a time of great austerity, of rationing and sacrifice gave way to renewed hope and optimism; and people started to look anew at a bomb scarred landscape, overgrown with weeds, boarded up and neglected, and dreamed of rebuilding it.

2012 promises to be a gloomy year. Reading these accounts of Londoners emerging from the drab, spartan, monochrome world of the late 1940s into the 1950s, a time of surging prosperity and optimism gives us some hope. After the war Britain was bankrupt. So much so that it was reduced to selling off its best coal and offering its citizens fuel of such low quality to heat their homes that the air in the capital became poisonous and rank, leading to the great fogs of 1948 and 1952 in particular, where people died in their thousands. Yet by 1957 Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (who, as Minister for Housing and Public Health, presided over the 1952 fog and only took action to placate public anger) was telling people that they'd never had it so good. Can there be a similar recovery? Perhaps. The only difference is back then Britain was recovering from a just and victorious war; whereas now we're recovering, or trying to recover, from the effects of naked greed and a discredited economic system which remains in place.

Patrick Hamilton

There are two great writers, for me, who chronicle pre and post war London. The first is Patrick Hamilton. I just reread Hangover Square and had forgotten how brilliant it was. It evokes a world of pubs, misty rain-soaked streets, shattered dreams and a city teetering on the edge of war so memorably that you can almost smell the booze and heartache. Hamilton was as dissolute as his central characters, an unhappy man who earned a great deal from his writing and blew almost all of it on drink. It shows. Both in the disintegration of his talent towards the end of his life, but also in the wonderful way he evokes London's pub life at the height of his powers. No one has chronicled London's pub life as well as he did.

Julian MacLaren-Ross

Apart from Julian MacLaren-Ross. He was poured from a similar bottle to Hamilton, in literary terms rather than personality, other than a fatal weakness for drink. MacLaren-Ross was a bohemian, a saloon bar dandy who haunted the bars of Fitzrovia. If that sounds romantic, forget it. MacLaren-Ross's life story detonates any myths that the freelance writing life is at all glamourous. It never was and never will be. In penury, in the early 1960s, with a wife, child and numerous debts to support despite his acclaimed novels and memoirs, MacLaren Ross churned out endless scripts and short stories to keep him and his family off the streets. It is Knut Hamsun's Hunger made flesh. The result was a swathe of great books and stories, and a host of drink-sodden bad ones. His biography, written by Paul Willetts, is car-crash reading, particularly so for we writers. Had Hamilton or MacLaren-Ross been forced to deal with modern publishing, dwindling advances, the rise of ebooks, neither of them would have seen 40.

But from the wreckage of those years, and those lives, some timeless fiction emerged. I wonder, given the austere gloom that is settling over most of the western world, what future generations will have to look forward to? Maybe the chroniclers are out there, mumbling into their glasses, darkly.

cheers

Dan - Friday

More Trouble with Rhinos

2012-01-05T05:23:00.000-05:00

Apologies for missing my post two weeks ago, and thanks to Stan for posting the previous rhino story for me. The internet was very shaky where I was; I suppose that's part of the fun of being there. But I'm sorry I missed all the Christmas and New Year fun on MIE at the time, although I've enjoyed catching up. I just love Jeff's poem!

Now here's the follow-up piece I was trying to post two weeks ago:

My White Christmas Rhino - Photo by Aron Frankental

Somewhat over a year ago, I was at my place in in the African bush watching elephants bathing in the river and writing about rhinos. I’m there again today and an elephant is busy demolishing a tree at the back of the bungalow.

It’s in the high nineties. Not much chance of a white Christmas unless it’s a white rhino. And white rhinos aren’t white anyway. The common name is a corruption of the Dutch word wijd which means wide, and the name comes from the wide mouth as opposed to the more pointy mouth of the so-called black rhino, which isn’t really black. Let’s move on before this gets too confusing.
The point is that there haven’t been any black rhinos here for quite a while. They used to occur in this area and the habitat is ideal for them. That’s the case for much of the so-called lowveld (low-lying bush country) of the north-east of South Africa.

Black or Hook-lipped Rhino

So as a conservation initiative the World Wild Life Fund has relocated 20 black rhinos from a breeding programme elsewhere in South Africa to a suitable location somewhere in the lowveld. No one’s saying where. It’s a big gamble because the animals are very valuable, and if they decide to wonder out of the game conservation area, they’ll be prey for poachers who can get big money for their horns. But the motivation is to have an additional group develop in a good habitat, hopefully providing a kernel for a new black rhino population. Wherever they are, they’ll be protected by electric fences, armed anti-poaching guards and high-tech security surveillance.

The threat to the survival of the African rhinos is nothing new. In the sixties, when I lived in Kenya, the population of black rhinos was around 100,000. They were fun to see in the bush, but nothing special. Thirty years later the population had dropped to just 2,500, but now the numbers have doubled. So things looked up but the numbers were still very low.

Rolling hills of Zululand

The white rhino story was even more dramatic. The population crashed to only 50 a century ago and the species was hanging onto survival in the wild in only a few isolated spots. A group of twenty were in (what was then) Natal on the eastern side of South Africa, and two areas - Hluhluwe and Umfolozi -became the first proclaimed game reserves in Africa in an attempt to save the species. A few other spots did the same but with less success. I remember seeing one of the last of the northern race in Uganda in the early sixties. The race now exists only in captivity. But thanks to the efforts at Umfolozi, the southern white rhino did amazingly well – the population has climbed to around 20,000. Umfolozi now has nearly 2,000 - the carrying capacity of the area - and has resettled thousands across southern Africa. You see them quite frequently in the Kruger National Park now and all of that is due to the commitment of the people at Umfolozi.

White or Square-lipped Rhino at Umfolozi

In my previous post, I naively hoped that a spate of arrests and convictions might stop the poaching in South Africa at least. But the stakes are too high. Recently allafrica.com reported a shoot out between Kruger National Park officials and five Mozambique soldiers, one of whom was killed and another injured. Even our small game reserve has been attached by rhino poachers - a shoot out resulted in no dead rhinos, one dead poacher and - wait for it - one of our game guards in jail on a culpable homicide charge.
Conservation officials now believe that the poaching of rhinos for their horns has reached the “tipping point”. That is the point in population dynamics at which the death rate exceeds the birth rate and the species starts to decline in numbers. If the poaching continues at the same pace, you don’t have to be a mathematician to see that the species is on the way to extinction.

So what I want for Christmas is a sighting of healthy, free rhinos. That makes it a white Christmas for me. And then I want to be able to see them again next Christmas.

Michael - Thursday

PS. At least I got the first part of my wish - see the first picture.

How do you get tourists to come to a place called Iceland?

2012-01-04T02:47:00.001-05:00

In an attempt to find something of interest to write about I went onto a webpage about Icelandic tourism operated by the Icelandic tourist board. I never got around to doing any reading because the photos were so enjoyable that I got lost in the images. My favorite was one promoting Icelandic scuba diving, something that most locals do not associate with our otherwise very lovely country. The reason is obvious when you look at the photo, please note that the fish is frozen stiff, if not dead of hypothermia. Maybe an image of a livelier looking specimen would have appeared more enticing. I for one will not be strapping on a tank here any time soon after seeing how the water affects the local fauna.

Another photo also made me smile, the one above showing a jumping whale. It was not the whale itself that caused my mirth but the text on the photo that read: “Iceland is among the 10 best destinations worldwide for whale watching”. Now, how much do you want to bet we ranked no. 10? If we had been no 1-5 it would have read “…among the 5 best.” So we range somewhere from 6-10 of all whale watching nations – not really impressive enough for someone really, really interested in seeing a whale to go out and buy a ticket over here. I mean how many whale watching nations are there in total? Not a lot more than ten. So we are maybe the worst whale watching nation in the world. Something you do not put on a tourism website obviously. But when I think about it, this low ranking does not make much sense. We have really nice sail boats used for these excursions, a lovely sea and mountainous scenery to enjoy while sailing – and lots of whales. So what happened here? The conclusion I have reached is that we lost points because the whale watchers polled witnessed harpooning too frequently. What a bummer. But seeing that we are likely to stop whaling in the near future since it is no longer chic, we might obtain a higher and more appropriate standing.

The web site was actually a goldmine of strangeness. The tent above for example. Why did whoever put it there surround it with rocks and stones? Is this a tourist and is he or she intending to take them back on the plane with them? The absence of sticks implies this has nothing to do with words never hurting the camper.

And this one, captioned: “Icelandic dairy products are of high quality.” Makes you want to jump on the next plane does it not? And why is the cow’s tail raised? In my mind that means only one thing and it ain’t pretty nor does it arouse an appetite for some high quality dairy products.

This one was captioned: “Icelandic girl on an Icelandic horse, holding an Icelandic dog.” Really? Is that not a bit too coordinated? An American beagle would have made it a bit less silly. And since they were really pounding the Icelandic theme, why leave out the fact that she is wearing and Icelandic woolen sweater? And given everything else, probably Icelandic shorts as well.

Then there was this one – “Ice climbing – South Iceland”. They made sure to separate it by dozens of photos from the scuba diving one, for obvious reasons.

But there were lots of non-funny, beautiful photos and I hope no one misunderstands the above and thinks Iceland is not the place to visit. Far from it. It is great. The photographer is one of our very best, Ragnar Th. Sigurdsson, and he did not do the captioning. This was done by the tourist board that has purchased the photos off him and allows one to download the photos for use.

So living in such a wonderful country with so much to see and do, what should I spend the rest of my day doing? The snow outside does not really scream out for scuba diving so I guess I will just go out riding an Icelandic horse holding an Icelandic dog. Considering the weather I don't think I will wear Icelandic shorts though.

Yrsa - Wednesday